Go To Online College And Take Courses For Free
A number of well-known colleges and universities offer free online courses that could save students hundreds to thousands of dollars. While free online courses might not provide credits toward degrees, they can contribute toward lifelong learning needs that educators have said are becoming increasingly important. Colleges, universities and technical schools such as MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), UC Berkeley, Yale and Columbia offer free online business courses, technology courses, humanities courses and more.
The OpenCourseWare Consortium website allows for researching schools and subject areas where free online courses are offered. Depending upon a student's selected course of study, instruction might come in the form of podcasts, text-based assignments, exams and YouTube video lectures, or a combination of any or all of these venues. OpenCulture.com notes that colleges and universities have been establishing presences on YouTube since at least 2007. You can find so much more information about schools online on the web.
Some say that free online courses can make higher education more of a reality for many students, and President Barack Obama has reportedly been among the proponents. In June, in fact, an Inside Higher Education article reported on a program that the Obama administration is crafting where federal money would help community colleges offer free online courses. The article noted that career-oriented courses would initially receive preference.
Institutions that offer free online courses through offerings such as YouTube can benefit from free public exposure as well, OpenCulture.com suggests. MIT's free online course website itself receives more than 1.5 million page views a month, according to a July report in arstechnicna.com. The MIT OpenCourseWare site was recently awarded a Science Magazine Science Prize for Online Resources in Education (SPORE), according to a July MIT news announcement.
Materials for more than 2,000 courses can be obtained from the MIT OpenCourseWare website. UC Berkeley's free online courses for the spring 2010 semester are available in subject areas such as anthropology, psychology, demography, economics and intro to environmental economics, and they're available in the form of podcasts and webcasts. Students interested in free online courses can also access archived courses; they might also enroll in free online courses from the likes of Carnegie Mellon and Michigan and Penn State universities also provide free online courses.
To keep employees up to date on work-related issues and skills, employers often pay for workers to attend job-related conferences and workshops. If employers are cutting back on costs such as these, or in instances where employees want to take their own initiative, they might explore free workshops and conferences that private companies also make available online at no cost. There are free webinars in topics that might help small business owners as well. Many more resources about accredited online colleges are available on the internet.
A handful of American colleges and universities take the concept of free courses one step further by offering a tuition-free education to those who qualify. One of the best known, the entirely online University of the People, according to a January Bloomberg Businessweek article tends to draw students from developing nations. The institution's provost and computer science department chair are leading educators from Columbia and New York universities, according to a November 2009 news item on the University of the People website.
Free online courses don't require applications. Students interested in applying to tuition-free colleges and universities, however, might note that institutions have different acceptance requirements, the Bloomberg article suggests. The Bloomberg Businessweek article on the web also mentions tuition-free colleges such as Cooper Union and Alice Lloyd.
These free online classes will encourage many to attend college and get an accredited degree online that will change how they work, where they work, and how the rest of their life progress.
